NEW YORK CITY & MONTCLAIR, NJ - May 5, 2020 – Amazon tried—and failed—to block a resolution filed by shareholders asking the company’s Board of Directors to conduct an independent review of the effectiveness of Amazon’s customer due diligence process, including whether customers’ use of Amazon products results in human rights violations. Shareholders now have a chance to vote in support of this resolution before the company’s annual shareholder meeting on May 27. Shareholders are concerned that customers are using Amazon’s tech products and cloud-based services to violate human rights by enabling racism, violence, and mass surveillance.
After shareholders initially filed the resolution, Amazon submitted a “no action” request to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in an effort to block shareholders from gaining information about how—and whether—the company assesses how its current or potential customers might use their products and services in ways that tangibly harm marginalized, vulnerable communities and negatively affect shareholder value. For example, shareholders are concerned that Amazon Web Services, by hosting ICE's case management and analysis software (developed by Palantir), is enabling ICE to carry out human rights abuses against immigrant communities through workplace raids, detention and deportation efforts. Shareholders are also concerned by police use of Ring doorbells to surveil neighborhoods without a warrant.
A separate shareholder resolution to be voted on at Amazon's annual meeting asks the company to examine civil and human rights risks potentially resulting from Amazon’s sale of its facial recognition surveillance technology, Rekognition, to government entities. The two shareholder resolutions highlight an expansion of the company's surveillance tech business in an unregulated environment. As Amazon attempts to silence shareholder concerns, it is moving full steam ahead with new, unchecked technologies. In December 2019, Amazon filed a patent to use vein scanners at Amazon Go stores, and the company is actively trying to get more police partnerships for its Ring home surveillance products, despite widespread concerns from lawmakers, civil rights groups, and the public.
Despite Amazon’s attempts, the shareholder proposal will be on the ballot at the annual meeting. The shareholder resolution was filed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, Investor Advocates for Social Justice and 8 co-filers from the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, with support from Open MIC.
Mary Beth Gallagher, Executive Director, Investor Advocates for Social Justice: “Investors are looking for information to reassure us that Amazon has effective management systems in place to address the serious risks that many of their quickly emerging technologies and services present. In the absence of information on Amazon’s Conditions of Use agreements or how it evaluates customer compliance with these agreements, investors are not able to assess if Amazon is meeting its responsibility for ensuring its customers are not abusing or misusing surveillance and cloud products to exacerbate racism, erode civil liberties, and threaten democracy.”
Hannah Lucal, Associate Director, Open MIC: “Amazon is unapologetic about the fact that its customers deploy its surveillance tech to make the world more dangerous, more racist, and more Orwellian. The company tried to block shareholders’ request for customer due diligence precisely because dangerous customer behavior increases profit. Whether it’s customers using the Neighbors app to spread racism online while encouraging racial profiling offline, or Palantir storing its data on Amazon cloud while enabling state violence against immigrant communities, shareholders have a growing list of reasons to carry out an independent review of Amazon’s customer vetting process.”
Investor concerns are echoed by lawmakers. In November 2019, Senator Ed Markey published an investigation of Ring citing “Egregiously Lax Privacy Policies and Civil Rights Protections”, and finding that “Ring has no oversight/compliance mechanisms in place to ensure that users don’t collect footage from beyond their property... [nor] to ensure that users don’t collect footage of children…[nor] to prohibit law enforcement from requesting and obtaining footage that does not comply with Ring’s Terms of Service.”
The resolution encourages Amazon to undertake “Know Your Customer” (KYC) due diligence processes, which are used by companies in a number of sectors to evaluate and mitigate clients’ potential legal, financial and reputational risks; this a standard, prudent approach to risk management. The resolution notes that “Inadequate due diligence around customers’ use of surveillance and cloud technologies presents privacy and data security risks, which the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board identifies as material for E-Commerce companies.”
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Michael Connor: (212) 875-9381 or mconnor@openmic.org